Power density will be on display this morning in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Virtually anyway. There is a groundbreaking for a 5.8 MW solar farm beginning at 10:30. This is wonderful news. The old, inefficient, environmentally challenged, coal-fired Mt. Tom Power Station ceased operation in 2014. The community wondered whether it would be a long-lived eyesore (like the long-closed English Station in New Haven, Connecticut) or would something new come along to take its place (like the remodeling of Chester Station in Pennsylvania into Class A office space with a soccer stadium to go with it? Or would it remain true to its existential essence and continue to deliver electricity, albeit from a different source?

I am sure you heard Hillary explain last night why she is going to take action on climate change. "I believe in science." We weren’t so articulate when we counseled last week to “Go to the Data,” but she figured it out. No plagiarism issues either.

In eight years of climate change blogging we think we have uniformly been able to steer clear of the prurient and the provocative, the lewd and the lascivious. But then came word last Friday from New York that the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had confirmed the zika virus – now endemic in Central and South America and the Caribbean and blamed for birth defects including microcephaly -- had been transmitted from a female to her male sexual partner. I checked with my censors. No, I couldn't go there (the CDC does). But not for the reasons you think.

We try to stay away from politics on the blog, so we were reluctant to take up the Sierra Club’s recent report concluding that if Donald Trump became president he would be unique among world leaders in his refusal to acknowledge climate change. Business Insider went one better back in January when it republished numerous tweets by Mr. Trump captioning climate change as a hoax, bull***, mythical and non-existent.

Everyone knows the transmission bottleneck is the boot on the neck of wind energy. The Plains States have megawatts of wind energy. Getting it to the places with megawatts of demand, like Oregon and Washington, aye, there’s the rub. If only an operating plant would expire and shuffle off its transmission lines to a wind farm.

Even as the number of 2016 presidential candidates in both parties has dwindled, the media -- particularly television news -- has yet to focus on an in-depth discussion of the candidates’ policy proposals. While it was difficult to discern the energy policies that a President Trump would implement, candidate Hillary Clinton has made quite clear the energy goals that a President H.R. Clinton would set. Including her “Clean Energy Challenge,” issued last summer, and the proposal to increase energy efficiency standards that she announced in February 2016, Clinton has made very specific and far-reaching plans that would continue and expand on the Obama Administration’s policies. The focus of her energy policy is twofold – address climate change and use the clean energy industry to grow the economy and create jobs. It seems safe to say the phrase “all of the above” will not apply to the Clinton administration energy policy.

We all know where the respective party “establishments” in Washington come down on climate change, clean power, and the pace at which the country should move to renewables as the primary source of energy (if at all). President Obama gave us the Paris Climate Agreement and the Clean Power Plan; the Republic Congress is not happy about either. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court effectively shut down the discussion until judicial review of the Clean Power Plan is complete – est. circa 2017 – so, the industry may now be better served by concentrating on the energy policies of the candidates to be our next president, one of whom will soon be setting policy for the next four years.

On November 9, 2015, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (“BOEM”) will hold the fifth auction of leases for space on the Outer Continental Shelf in the Atlantic Ocean, this one offshore New Jersey. BOEM will offer 342,833 acres in two lease blocks, enough space to support at least 3,400 megawatts (“MW”) of commercial wind generation, which – according to BOEM -- could power approximately 1.2 million homes.

Some might say that the Clean Power Plan is all one needs to talk about in any highlights article on recent climate change legal issues. When final the CPP will expand the scope of the Clean Air Act profoundly, impact the electricity business fundamentally, restrict the coal industry severely and raise electricity rates for consumers by more than just pennies.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Michigan v. EPA holding that the Environmental Protection Agency should have considered costs when making the decision to regulate mercury emissions from power plants (the “MATS Rule”) may have put the brakes on the late-summer release of the final Clean Power Plan (“CPP”), the regulations limiting CO2 emissions from power plants – but not because EPA failed to consider the costs. They did, just not the right ones.

McCARTER & ENGLISH CLIMATE CHANGE AND RENEWABLE ENERGY PRACTICE GROUP

The business case for the development of renewable energy projects, from biodiesel and ethanol to wind, solar, and distributed generation, is more compelling than ever as tax and regulatory incentives combine to attract investments. Emerging issues in environmental law and increasingly recognized principles of corporate social responsibility are encouraging public companies to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas emissions, install clean energy alternatives, and invest overseas in projects under the Kyoto Protocol to respond to climate change concerns.